This program trains future management professionals. Students who graduate from this cross-cutting researched-based program are prepared for top positions in state, federal, private agencies responsible for wildlife and fisheries management, and related activities. Our graduates are leaders in biodiversity conservation, natural resource management, and the sustainable use of natural resources. We are ranked among the best in the country.
Students are able to tailor their education and research interests for this degree program with the help of their major advisor and advisory committees. Subject matter areas include the study of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, natural-resource systems, and span the broad fields of wildlife ecology and management, fisheries ecology and management, aquaculture, biodiversity and systematics, conservation education, and the human dimensions of wildlife and fisheries resource management. Research in these fields is supported by disciplinary expertise in autecology and synecology, evolutionary biology, resource sociology, animal behavior, physiology, animal diseases and parasitology, bioenergetics, nutrition, genetics, and systems analysis and modeling. Although much of the research program is without geographic bounds, the more site-specific aspects of the program focus on Texas, Mexico, and the neotropics.